Last month, we looked at the NFL’s financial revenue breakdown, and today we will do the comparisons to the NBA, MLB, and the NHL. There are five major revenue streams in professional sports across North America, and we’ve used 2023 data from Sportico.com for this analysis. In order, of course, football is the richest sport, followed by basketball and baseball, with hockey bringing up the distant rear … still wealthy.

Here are the key breakdowns of the aforementioned five streams with percentage of overall intake noted:

  • National TV/Media: NFL (66 percent), NBA (41), MLB (26), NHL (19)
  • Ticket Sales: NHL (44), MLB (31), NBA (26), NFL (17)
  • Team Sponsorships: NHL (14), NBA (12), MLB (10), NFL (10)
  • Concessions/Parking: NHL (12), MLB (10), NBA (8), NFL (6)
  • Local TV/Media: MLB (23), NBA (13), NHL (11), NFL (1)

The first thing to notice is that the NFL is first in national television/media revenue—but last in all other streams. The largest chunk of all this is the national TV rights to pro football, demonstrating the NFL certainly contrive to promote certain teams and players for maximum exposure and subsequent revenue driven by “human interest” and “player connection” that plays so well with the audience, despite problems.

Controversy works well for the NFL, however, and almost everyone in the world stops to watch the Super Bowl. This is somewhat unique in the sense that the other sports, more fans tune out once their team is eliminated. The NBA benefits from worldwide audiences, too, for teams with international rosters—even from small TV markets like Milwaukee or San Antonio. Hence, the small-city teams can still win in the NBA.

That’s not the case with baseball at all, as we have shown the myriad of integrity problems with MLB. It needs ticket sales, and for a 162-game season, the teams with big metropolitan populations must win to put butts in the seats and local eyes glued to the TV sets, too. Between ticket sales and local media, MLB teams get 54 percent of their revenue that way. The national TV money is evenly split, of course, but that is less.

With 20 percent additionally about the game-day experience at the ballpark, baseball is a sport that needs winner to profit, really (depending on payroll). Almost three quarters of MLB revenue comes from local, game-day revenue streams: if the team isn’t winning, the local fans don’t spend the money. This is a problem that plagued big-city, non-winning franchises in Boston, San Francisco, Houston, and Dallas.

When it comes to hockey, the NHL’s biggest revenue stream is ticket sales, although the sport also leads its peers in team sponsorships (14 percent) as well as concessions/parking (12). Therefore, the non-media revenue streams add up to 70 percent of the league’s revenue, putting a focus on the in-game experience rather than the stay-at-home audience (30 percent). Thus, the TV rights have less influence over results.

This is all pretty easy to figure out once you start connecting the dots. Try it sometime; you may surprise yourself.